BROKEN WiNG
by LordWindyKilt
Summary: An in-depth view of Oblio's personal life and childhood. (WARNINGS: suicide mention, sexual content)
1. Chapter 1

**CHAPTER 1: JAPANESE DEATH P** **O** **EMS**

I'm back.

My year of absence awoke in me my most significant memories, and they hurt.

But I loved the hurt, and the dark memories were oddly stimulating to my mentality.

As demoralized and jaded as I became during that year, my one safety was the strong hold my father had on me. I feel as though if it were anyone else keeping me in confinement, I would have destroyed myself without my own knowing.

It was not him who made that miserable year so difficult... there were other factors. If it were only his doing, no one else's, I might've only felt so much as betrayed confusion. I have to keep in mind, I wasn't the only one. Dare and Maccoy were subject to confinement as well. Contrary to my knowledge of such things, I only drifted further away from Dare through that year. Maccoy grew closer to me, but Dare seemed to hate me more and more with each passing day.

We used to almost be friends.

Dare speaks fluent Japanese, and Glitch has learned a lot of his from me teaching it to him, learning it fast. Because Glitch is much younger than me and can be uncomfortably friendly with everyone, it is easier to talk to Dare. She also lived in Japan for a short time and her father is Japanese.

Shockingly, she was never bullied in attending Japanese high school, but her friends were. They groundlessly told her that high school in America was the best time of any kid's life.

She told me, "People say that here in America sometimes, too, but... Honestly, if high school was the best time of your life, then your life sucks."

I completely agreed. Though she already knows how severe harassment is in Japanese schools, I did not tell her about my own experience. I didn't want to tell her, even though I could vaguely consider her a friend.

My Japanese name is 丸. Maru. "Circle". "Purity". My real father must have called me Maru before we were separated, but I have little to no memory of that time. "Oblio" is Italian for "oblivion", which I find satisfyingly poetic. The Italian word "oblio" is also similar to the word for "forgotten" or "forget" in other languages.

I stood out at school because of my white hair and blue eyes. Even when I put temporary black dye in my hair, the harassment continued. I couldn't hide the color of my eyes, as it was very noticeable even from a distance, and my albino skin tone made me look European among a sea of Asian students.

In Japan, we are encouraged from birth not to stand out. But my birth father, before I was separated from him, allowed me to be whoever I wanted, and that's what nearly destroyed me, though I knew he meant well and only ever wanted the best for me. He didn't think of how cruel high school students could be, and how they'd target you as their plaything if they noticed anything different about you.

Students had printed copies of my school photo and taped them all over the halls, scribbling obscene messages on them and scratching out my eyes. Plenty of days, I'd walked into homeroom and saw my name written on the chalkboard, accompanying words like "slut". Some of which even written in English.

In Japan, the most memorable class in school is, of course, homeroom, where you become most familiar with your teachers and fellow students, but I was not close with any of them. I was glad for that. What they did to me would've hurt worse if they'd earlier convinced me that we might be friends.

They attacked me one day, collectively.

"I think Maru should just die," Noriko said. I didn't understand. She was nice to everyone else.

I'd heard these words many times before. But this time was different. I heard it again. And again. And again. And again.

They got louder. More joined in.

"Kill yourself!" They shouted. Nearly every one of them. Joyfully.

死んで。

 _Shinde._

Die _._

My feelings, my heart and soul, they directed my body, which felt rigid, yet full of electricity.

And then I was standing before the open window, my knees bent to lift myself onto its frame. My senses failed as my vision became blurry and my ability to hear faded in and out.

"Jump!" They shouted. Like it were a game.

The teacher didn't know what to do.

I don't even remember stepping down from that window sill, or leaving the classroom. I was on auto-pilot for the rest of the day, repeatedly imagining myself falling out of that window.

Falling from that high up, the impact must feel like a thousand hands slapping one's body at once. Upon hitting the ground at such a high velocity, the skin might break to spill so much blood, leaving dark bruises where it did not. Then my skull could've broken open, dripping anything that might be left inside after that mind-deteriorating morning. My limbs would shatter, useless after the weight they carried, my unyielding body. My ribcage shattering, I'd hope my heart would spill out and burst, my feelings being proved not to matter, as they'd only become so much as a puddle of blood.

School didn't worsen after that day, but it didn't improve.

Every morning, I'd open my shoe locker and make sure there were no thumbtacks in my shoes or chrysanthemums or cruel messages before allowing myself to relax for the day. But I could never relax.

This, my freshman year in high school, was about when I started learning transcendental meditation. Instead of standing up to my assailants, I released the pain that collected on me like termites to wood, rewiring my energy the moment I got home.

My guardian at the time, his name was Tanuchi Keichi. He was one of the kindest men I'd ever met.

He had no children and was unmarried, so after my previous guardian had gotten himself arrested, I was handed over to lonely Tanuchi-san, who was notorious for his unconditional kindness.

I never told him about the things that happened to me at school.

And I never had the chance. He died of an aneurysm shortly before I graduated, and I still did not know how to cry. I went to his funeral with a stone face, but my heart was collapsing in on itself.

More than anything, I just needed my father.


	2. Chapter 2

**CHAPTER 2: ALiCE'S ADVENTURES IN W** **O** **NDERLAND**

 _"I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other."_  
 ** _-Rainer Maria Rilke_**

I used to speculate that I was suffering from schizophrenia.

Waking from recurring nightmares that are so intensely horrifying that I wake in a cold sweat and nausea, increasingly vivid and disturbing hallucinations, sudden and strong urges of suicide that may spike in the middle of happiness, difficulty expressing my emotions, sudden outbursts of crying, sleepless nights... Medication has always made this worse, so I seek other methods such as transcendental meditation and spending most of my time outside.

The only time I doubt my self-labeling of schizophrenia is when I remember the state of mind of a girl from high school, who really did suffer from the disorder.

I actually considered her to be overly cheerful, until she became my only friend. She often had this outrageous, outstanding ideas that ranged from very creative and intellectual to disturbing and paranoid. She also tended to talk out of turn quite often with very irrelevant statements. This caused a strange reaction among other students, as some were terrified of her, while others always wanted to be around her. I didn't know she had hallucinations until shortly before she died, only fifteen years old.

The images she described to be seeing were... nightmare-inducing. I would lie awake with the lights on in my room, unable to shut my eyes. She would also describe this rapid, violent whispering she kept hearing. Most of the time, the voices spoke so fast she couldn't comprehend what they were saying, but when she could, they were very hostile.

She was known to be able to imitate voices and sounds very well, and when she demonstrated what these voices sounded like, I couldn't get them out of my own head. Even now, it petrifies me to remember her imitation. Especially since she's dead now.

My mental state worsened with time, and I began to have paranoid thoughts and neglected my personal health. My guardian at the time, Dan Fester, didn't seem to notice or to care until I brought it up. Then he just became angry with me for being a "paranoid psycho".

Honestly; the people they allow to be foster parents...

Most people say that Los Angeles is not the place for someone like me, but I know my place. I'd ride my motorcycle in the more ghetto parts of L.A., and in doing so, I'd discover things.

Street dancers. Not the same as the Japanese pop stars who had inspired me to start dancing, but they showed me a new perspective: I didn't have to be anything special to learn how to dance.

I'd watch the street dancers hit the cardboard with their giant portable stereos to weigh it down. It was not at all the style of dancing I later pursued, but it was also much different from the only type of dancing I knew how to do at the time from working at a strip club. I wanted to be able to dance in public like that, though, today, I do still throw some of the strip club-style dance into my routines.

So I went to my hidden oasis at the base of Johnstone Peak, where there were a cluster of willow trees. I find these trees very calming, and this is where I go to do most of the things I do every day: meditate, relax, read, write, and it's also the first place I discovered I was a natural-born dancer. I come up with most of my routines out there.

This was also the place I saw my first human corpse, and strangely, that was a reason why I liked it there. I'd ridden there on my motorcycle one day and found a murder of crows. When I drew nearer, I noticed they were eating on something.

It was a person. When I called the police to take the body away, they couldn't identify him because the crows had pecked out his face. When the body was taken away, I felt a stronger connection to that place.

My paranoia slowly went away when I started dancing. My hallucinations remained, and so did my spontaneous episodes of crying and horrible, horrible nightmares. But I started to take much better care of myself and I embraced both light and darkness after I'd found something to do with my life besides writing awful poetry and sleeping with lots of older guys and drinking a lot and generally being a bitch.

And finally, when I was adopted into our "family of dancers" and given sanctuary by Rasa and Lima, Dan was actually impressed with me. He said, "Boy, you can't write for shit, but you sure are an excellent dancer."

 ****************************************************************  
 **"IF I HAD A W** **O** **RLD OF MY** **O** **WN, EVERYTHiNG W** **O** **ULD BE N** **O** **NSENSE."**  
 ****************************************************************

For the longest time, Oblio mostly avoided the other dancers. He'd show up to rehearse with his backup dancers, and then he'd leave on his motorcycle as soon as they were done. At shows, he'd perform, maybe watch the other dancers to be polite or something, and then take off. Even the parties that went on at his own house, he was absent for, or at least hidden. The group meetings about shows and rehearsals, where Rasa and Lima also gave tips on the lifestyle of a dancer, he was usually silent, just as he was when we all had to wait in a room together before the shows started.

But thanks to Sergio Angel Belleza, that beautiful Puerto Rican dancer with a golden heart, Oblio was able to open up. Angel was really the only person who was noticeably interested in him, and he was determined to make him talk.

" _¿Estás bien?_ "

"... ?"

"Are you okay?"

The first thing Angel said to him when he got in a motorcycle accident but showed up to a rehearsal anyway. It wasn't only because Angel was pushing on him; he actually cared about the well-being of others.

"You care?" Oblio asked, amazed someone had finally asked that.

"Yeah, why wouldn't I?" Angel said cheerfully, laughing gently.

Oblio finally gave in, "It hurts."

Of course it did. He was badly scraped, and while he hadn't broke anything, he definitely had a sprain or two. And yet, he soldiered through the entire rehearsal anyway, which made the pain so much worse.

"I know. You should've sat out on this one."

"I can't. We have a show in a week."

"Yeah, but you skip out on rehearsals a lot, and you still come back and do the performance perfectly. I don't know how you do it, but seriously, you should've just gone home. Maybe even to a hospital or something."

"I'm fine."

Angel rolled his eyes, but kept his smile, "You just said you weren't."

"I..."

"Don't hurt yourself anymore. Go home, okay?"

This first exchange initiated a warm relationship.

Oblio didn't like to talk about himself, unlike most people. But when he established a close relationship with Angel, he felt compelled to do so. Angel was the only person he could relate to, in terms of the despairing loneliness they both felt that only went away when they were together.

At a later date, they shared their first personal conversation.

"All my friends in high school were fake friends," Angel said, "They only spent time around me because they thought I was rich, and then they abandoned me when they found out I was the opposite."

"I only had one friend in high school and she killed herself," Oblio said, shocking Angel.

Her name was Alice, or Arisu. She was blonde; a transfer student from America. Japanese high school was not the right place for her, as she was already suffering from depression and thoughts of suicide. But she was very cheerful around Oblio, and probably one of the best friends he'd had in his entire young life. She said strange, scary things sometimes, but was very loving and supportive of Oblio, his dreams, his interests, and his sexuality.

In fact... her suicide note was made for him to find. She'd tied it to her ankle with the extra rope before hanging herself in one of Oblio's hiding places in an abandoned shack in a forest behind the school.

The note said, "I hope you become a dancer like you always wanted! I hope you find a nice boyfriend! Good luck, and good bye! Thank you for everything!"

It wasn't fair. The note was so cheerful in demeanor, and she didn't mention anyone in the note but Oblio. As if he were the only person who was meant to find her, the only person who would care. He almost felt victimized.

But he did pursue his dreams, for her and himself. Before he saw that note written just for him, he thought of life as a dancer to only be an unreachable fantasy. It was a nice thought, but he was convinced it was only an escape to his imagination.

Until Alice showed him that his dreams were also hers in her last moments.

"And you made her dreams come true," Angel smiled cautiously.

Oblio smiled, and then he started to cry.


	3. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER 3: D** **O** **N QUiX** **O** **TE**

 _"The soul's joy lies in doing."_  
 ** _-Percy Bysshe Shelley_**

Dance Central is... It's difficult to correctly explain what it is. We're a group of dancers who started as two talented friends and expanded. Rasa and Lima were friends in high school, and they entered the talent show calling themselves "Dance Central". And then they sort of became freelance talent scouts, adopting people into their group who they saw to be exceptionally talented or very potentially talented. Usually, however, these are unusual people with unusual styles of dancing or who aren't even dancers at all in the beginning. Lima and Rasa have some very specific way of choosing their dancers.

The first person they made a part of Dance Central was Mo, who was not a dancer, but an amateur basketball player. They noticed he had this odd way of playing where he would sort of pop-and-lock before shooting the ball. Maybe he was just playing around, or maybe it somehow enhanced his playing ability. And then he would show off and b-boy while playing hacky-sack or something. Apparently, it was hilarious. But Rasa and Lima noticed it and made him a dancer.

Mo is someone I admire for his like-mindedness with poetry and creative writing. I don't know him very well, but we once had a deep conversation about the Ellie Goulding song, "Lights", and its meaning tracing back to Goulding's fear of the dark. This conversation fell into a personal spiral, and I learned Mo's childhood was easily represented by this song, as he feared the dark so intensely as a child that he boosted the family's electric bill from constantly turning on all the lights in the house.

I had worked hard on a routine for this song. It turned out to be my best, I believe. However, not only was Mo having trouble putting together a routine for the next show because of problems at home, but I knew this song belonged to him. So I let him be the first to perform it.

I've given away my routines to the other dancers more than I should have, but I don't do so as much anymore now that I've become less of a brooding loner. Bass Down Low was given to Rasa and Lima to perform, as Maccoy taught Lil T his Vanilla Ice routine so she could perform it while Maccoy was helping his grandmother recover from knee surgery.

We do this occasionally, donating routines to each other if a dancer is having complications. Before performing a song, we'll mention who choreographed it or have a screen up behind the stage that says so. Even without that, each of us have distinctive styles, some of us so much that we can recognize exactly who choreographed a certain song no matter who is performing it.

All of us dancers have roots that we used to develop our unique, individual styles of dancing. These show in our routines. Miss Aubrey was a ballet dancer, Angel did traditional Latin style, some of us did krump and freestyle, others weren't even necessarily dancers initially. I, for example, was a stripper.

While I had already began developing a "real" style of dancing on the side, Rasa and Lima somehow discovered me. I worked at a place in LA called The Shaft, where the "employees" could only be hand-picked androgynous young men, so I fit in right away. I was only sixteen when I started, lying that I was eighteen. Customers were mostly men, but there were definitely women as well. At age seventeen, one night when my hours were over, Rasa and Lima greeted me in the back of the club as I was walking out.

They asked me if I wanted to become a dancer, using almost those same words. Wanting to go after what I desired, and knowing that I would no longer have to live the closest lifestyle to dancing that I believed I was capable of, I said yes.

I don't know why I didn't quit my so-called "job" right away. Maybe I liked it. Truthfully... I've made more money working as a stripper than at any other job.

At ages fifteen and sixteen, I picked up English quite fast in my last year in Japan and my first year in LA. I regret it now, but that same year, I decided I was sick of high school and got a GED so I could start college early. Once again, I stood out, one of the only people at school who was only sixteen, but no one teased me or singled me out. I was both shocked and relieved.

I had felt the state of my life finally improving.

My first existential experience with dancing manifested when I found myself unable to meditate. So much noise in my head, so much noise outside of it, my hearing was so sensitive that every little noise was internally raised in volume. This noise disgusted me, made me furious.

Obviously... If you can't will away the noise, why not drown it out?

A person cannot easily avoid sound. Like water, if you block it in one area, it will find another way. It is also difficult to not think about sound. If you think about it, it becomes louder. I have a sort of anxiety when it comes to loud noise that is not music or the familiar noise of a motorcycle engine. When I need quiet and serenity, every sound is a hideous obstruction, and I need silence quite often.

But when the music turns on, when I hear it and I have that need to move, when I start moving, I feel something else.

Hyped. Exhilarated. And for lack of a formal way to say this... "awesome".  
That's the thing about dancing. You feel so cool, no matter how humble you are, and no one has the right to pull you down for thinking highly of yourself, because you are already up there.

This was another way to meditate. I don't think of meditation as simply resting in a circle of candles and performing breathing exercises and mantras; it's anything that can be done to bring someone to where they feel centered and balanced.

Even sex is a form of meditation.

To me, in a way, sex and dancing are nearly the same thing, except one you can do in public, and the other you cannot. This is why I found it so intriguing that so many cultures sexualize dancing. Especially in front of a crowd, you are being worshiped and adored while experiencing undeniable pleasure, wanting to be sure the audience feels it, too, from the pounding music and the movement of your body. Both acts are means of releasing tension and stress.

I do believe my discovery of dancing was also my discovery of having fun. The other dancers have said they've never had so much fun doing anything as they have dancing, and I agree.

Dancing is the purest form of art.


End file.
